Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  I NEED BROTHERS AND SISTERS FOR LANE WARD AND ALSO PHOTO FOR WARD . SOONEST .

  WILL DUMP TO YOUR BOX ONE HOUR. YOU MUST GO OUT ON NET!!! READ FIREWALL. I WILL CHECK ON STANFORD.

  OK . . . WILL CALL BACK .

  Dial tone and out.

  I read down the screen once more, wiped out everything but the letter, printed it, and then said, “Hey.”

  Lane drifted back. “What?” she asked.

  “A letter from your brother.”

  “Aw, jeez.”

  I pulled it out of the printer and handed it to her. She took a minute reading it, a little vertical line between her eyes. Then she read it again and a tear trickled down one cheek. Finally, she looked up.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Curiosity. Jack was a computer guy. If you tell a computer guy not to look in a file, he’ll look in the file.”

  “Especially if he thinks of himself as some kind of cool James Bond guy,” she said. Like it was my fault.

  “Do you know anything about a group called Firewall?” I asked.

  She gave me a long look and then asked, “Are you working for the government?”

  That took a while to sort out. I told her about Bobby’s strange anxiety and she suggested that I do what Bobby wanted: that I look up Firewall in the papers and on the Net. I went back out, with Lane looking over my shoulder.

  Eight days earlier, as I’d been sitting on my living room floor sorting out pike lures, a National Security Agency bureaucrat named Lighter had been murdered walking near his home in Maryland. Jack was killed the next night, twelve hours before I flew out to Kenora.

  According to the online papers, the Lighter killing was at first thought to be a random mugging, although the detectives working the murder had been disturbed by some of its aspects. There was no sign that Lighter had fought his assailants, or tried to run. He’d simply been gunned down. Lighter’s wife told police that he’d been mugged once before, when they lived in Washington, and that he had calmly handed over his wallet while he tried to reassure the muggers that he was not a threat. In other words, there was no reason to kill him to get his money. And he’d been shot down on a quiet suburban street, where mugging, much less murder, was almost unknown.

  A couple of days later, rumors began to surface on the Net that he’d been killed by a radical hacker group calling itself Firewall. Firewall claimed to be taking “preemptive revenge” for the Clipper II, although the Clipper II was widely believed to be a dead issue. And some names had surfaced . . . CarlG, Dave, Bobby, FirstOctober, RasputinIV, k, LotusElan, One2Oxford, Stanford, Whitey.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  To cover myself: “Do you know your brother’s working name?”

  “You mean, Yellowjacket? That’s his gamer name.”

  “I never heard that. He’d always been Stanford.” I tapped the list on the screen. “They’ve got him listed as a member of this Firewall.”

  She looked. “Stanford is Jack? Huh . . .” She turned away, slowly, thinking.

  “What?”

  “You don’t talk with the government,” she said. A statement, with a question inside.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I have,” she said, slowly. “They asked me not to tell anyone. I talked to them on Tuesday. I was interviewed for two hours by the FBI. About Firewall. Where Jack had been traveling and who his friends are. I didn’t know any of that, except some friends we have in common. Jack would travel about once a year, to Europe, but that was about it. The last time he was out of the country was six months ago.”

  “You didn’t mention me?”

  “No, of course not. I know better than that,” she said.

  “What do you know about Firewall?”

  “Nothing. I’d never heard of it. Jack would have told me, if he was involved. But those little Net conspiracies . . . you know what they are. They’re socially retarded geeks who think they’re living a comic book. Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Neither would I.”

  “Executing a guy because he’s working on Clipper II . . . that doesn’t sound like socially retarded geeks,” I said.

  “Oh, no?” she asked. “Then who else could it be? Murdering somebody over a chip—not even a real chip? And who else would care, besides geeks?”

  “The Mafia?”

  “Oh, bullshit.” She rolled her eyes.

  “It’s too . . . physical.”

  She put her hands on her hips: “Look at yourself, for Christ’s sakes, Kidd. You’re some kind of aging jock-nerd-engineer-fisherman-artist with a broken nose. What if it’s somebody just like you, with a taste for blood?”

  No answer to that. The question was urgent, if the feds and spy people and God knew who else were tearing up the countryside, because Bobby was on the list. And so was I. I was “k.”

  Lane kept going back to Jack’s letter.

  “Where’s the safest possible place?” she asked.

  “Somewhere I could get at them, I guess.” I had an idea, but wasn’t about to show it. Not until I knew her better. “Maybe he shipped them somewhere. I’ve got a bunch of mailboxes, scattered around. I’ve even got one at AOL.”

  “Check them.”

  I went back online, checked them, and came up empty. Lane was reading Jack’s letter again. She snapped it with a fingertip and said, “One thing that bothers me about the letter is the line about not taking any wooden pussy.”

  “Wooden what?” I’d barely noticed the line.

  “Pussy. The thing that bothers me is, I don’t think Jack talked like that. Are we sure this is from Jack?”

  I had to laugh, because it sounded exactly like Jack; and exactly the kind of thing that Jack would never say around, say, a sister, or any other woman. “Yeah, he did talk that way, sometimes,” I said. Then: “Is it possible that you really didn’t know Jack as well as you thought you did? That he might have a life that you didn’t know about. Maybe involving guns?”

  “No,” she said positively. “I mean, I’m sure he did things I don’t know about, that he’d hide from me. He got along very well with a certain kind of ditzy chick. Maybe he’d say pussy—he just didn’t say it to me. But with the guns, we’re talking basic, rock-bottom personality. He didn’t shoot anybody.”

  “Okay.” Then I noticed something a little odd. “You say he was killed on Friday?”

  “Yes. Friday night.” She caught the puzzled look as I read the letter again. “Why?”

  “Because the letter was time-stamped on Sunday—the Sunday before he was killed. He said he was going in then . . .”

  “What have I been telling you? There’s something seriously wrong with the whole thing.”

  We talked about the possibilities; and in the back of my head, there was that “k” floating around out there. The feds were looking for k . . .

  So are you going back to Dallas with me?” she asked, eventually.

  “You’re going back?”

  “I’ve got to. I’ve got to sign papers and everything, when they’re done with him.” Another tear popped out and I turned away: I don’t deal well with weeping women. I tend to babble. “So are you going? I made a reservation for you. I could really use somebody to lean on . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” I said. “But don’t cry, huh? Please?”

  She’d made a reservation for that same night, on the last plane out. I took a moment to go downstairs to tell Alice to watch after the cat, and then I went back out on the Net and read everything I could find on Firewall: there was a ton of stuff, but mostly bullshit. Then I went to my box at Bobby’s, and found a picture and a note. The picture was of Lane Ward, looking nice in a professorial business suit, a wall of books in the background. The note said, Her only brother was JM.

  Finally, I called the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, on a voice line, and got Weenie, the owner-bartender. He’s a toothpick-chewing fat man with a steel-gray butch; an apron that he laundered every month, wheth
er it needed it or not; and who always smells like greasy hamburgers and barbequed onion rings. I said, “This is the guy from St. Paul. I need to talk to LuEllen.”

  “She’s off right now,” he said. “I can take a message.”

  LuEllen was always off. Weenie theoretically paid her $28,000 a year as a waitress, and she paid taxes on the $28,000 plus $6,000 in tips. In reality, Weenie stuck the tax-free $28,000 in his pocket and sent LuEllen the W-2 form. Weenie was her answering service. The W-2 form explained to the government how she paid for her house, wherever that was.

  “Tell her that Stanford was killed,” I said. “The funeral’s set for Santa Cruz next Wednesday. I’m going to Dallas, but I’ll be in Santa Cruz for the funeral.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Weenie said. “That’s Stanford, like in the university.”

  On the way out the door, on the way to the airport, I stopped, Lane already in the hall, went back to the workroom and got a small wooden box made in Poland. I stuck it in my jacket pocket. Just in case.

  At the airport, I picked up the major papers, and as soon as we were off the ground, began looking for Firewall stories. They all carried at least one, but nothing on the front page. Firewall appeared to be suffering media death.

  While I read, Lane kicked back and slept. She was not a large woman and could snuggle into the seat like a squirrel on a pillow. I stared at the seat in front of me for a while, and when she was asleep, took the wooden box out of my pocket. Inside, I kept a Ryder-Waite tarot deck wrapped in a silk cloth.

  I’m not superstitious. More than that: I refuse superstition. Ghosts and goblins and astrology and numerology and phrenology and all the New Age bullshit of mother goddesses and wicca; the world would be a happier place if it’d die quietly.

  Tarot is different. Tarot is—can be—a kind of gaming system that forces you out of a particular mind-set. Let’s say you’re trying to . . . oh, say, steal something. Your mind-set says X is a danger and Y is a danger, but the tarot says, “Think about Z.” So you start thinking about things outside of the mind-set, and when you finally do the entry, you’ve considered a whole spread of possibilities that otherwise would have gone unsuspected.

  Nothing magic about it; and it will definitely save your ass.

  So I did one quick spread, of my own invention, working toward a key card. The card came up.

  The Devil. Interesting . . .

  I sat looking at the evil fuck for a few seconds, sighed, stood up, got my bag out of the overhead bin, and stowed the tarot deck. Thought about it for a second, then dug out the little eight-cake Winsor & Newton watercolor tin and my sketchbook. I got a glass of water from the stewardess and started doing quick watercolor sketches of Lane, the cabin, and the two business guys across the aisle.

  The closest business guy looked like a salesman—balding, pudgy, triple-chinned, exhausted. He sat head-down and dozing, his red, yellow, and black necktie splashing down his chest and stomach like a waterfall. The guy behind him was just as exhausted, but was too thin, his skull plainly carving the shape of his head. I got three good ones of the two of them, the thin man like death’s shadow behind the fat one. I struggled to get the red necktie right, working the planes as it twisted down his shirt.

  A stewardess stopped to watch for a few minutes, then disappeared into the front of the plane. A couple of minutes later, the copilot came back, watched for a while, said he did a little watercolor himself, and asked me if I’d ever seen the cockpit of a D9S at night. I hadn’t, and he showed me the way.

  I did a half-dozen sketches of the crew at work, and left them behind: they all seemed pleased, and so was I. In the twenty years after I got out of college, I don’t think I went a day without drawing or painting something, except during a couple of hospital visits; even then, when I could start moving, the first thing I did was ask for a pencil.

  In all those years, the work got tighter and tighter and tighter, until I felt like I hardly had the muscle to pick up a pencil or a pen or a brush: I could wear myself out in an hour, just moving a brush around. Then I broke through. The brush got lighter, and the work became fluid. The actual breakthrough came during a rough visit to Washington, D.C. I’d left behind the Washington nightmares—hadn’t had one for a couple of years, now—but the fluidity seemed to hang around . . .

  I got back to my seat, restowed the Winsor & Newton tin and the sketchbook, and buckled up for the landing. When the wheels came down, Lane started, stirred, woke up and yawned, covering her mouth with a balled fist, pushed up the window shade, and looked out at the lights of Dallas and then, as we turned, of Fort Worth.

  “My mouth tastes like something died inside it,” she said, her voice a little husky. A good voice to wake up to. She looked me over: “What’d you do? Sit there and stare at the seat back?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  Going out the door, the stewardess squeezed my arm and said, “Thanks so much, you’re really good.” Lane looked like she might drop dead of curiosity as we walked up the ramp, but then she finally asked, “What was that all about?”

  I said, “Oh. You know . . .”

  “Be a jerk,” she said. But she was smiling.

  We stayed overnight at a Marriott. Early the next morning, she was pounding on my door, and at nine o’clock, we were headed down to Dallas police headquarters. Lane wanted me to go inside with her, but I don’t talk to cops when I can avoid it. She went in alone, a little pissed. Twenty minutes later, she was back, and told me about it as we drove back to the hotel.

  The cops had been pretty straightforward about it, she said. “I got into their faces a little bit, but they wouldn’t budge. This guy I talked to said Jack was into something tricky. That’s the word he used. Tricky.”

  “And that’s what they’ve got? That’s all? That he was doing something tricky?”

  “No.” She was reluctant to talk; I had to pry it out of her. “They say they traced the gun he supposedly used. It was stolen in San Jose six years ago.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Yeah. I kept saying Jack would never use a gun, and they kept saying, then how come the gun came from San Jose?” She was looking up at me with her dark eyes, pleading with me to understand that what the cops had said was all bullshit. “They said, ‘AmMath framed him using a gun that was stolen six years ago in San Jose? How did they do that?’ ”

  “Good question,” I said.

  “Jack would not shoot anybody,” Lane insisted.

  “You can’t always tell what somebody will do when he’s cornered, and he thinks that his life may be ruined. Or that he might go to prison,” I said. “Or maybe he thought the guard was about to shoot him, and it was self-defense.”

  She didn’t want to hear about it, and after we’d snarled at each other for a few minutes, I let it go. “So that’s it—they got a gun.”

  “There were a couple more things,” she said, reluctantly. Then, “Watch it!”

  I hit the brakes; a blue Toyota pickup chopped us off just as we headed up a freeway on-ramp. He never knew I was there. I shook my head, and said, “Asshole,” and then, “Listen, Lane, you gotta tell me everything they said. I don’t want to have to drag it out of you. I’m supposed to be on your side.”

  “It’s all bullshit. You should’ve come in, then you could have heard it for yourself.”

  “What’re the other things?”

  The cop had explained that there were three doors into the secure area—two of them alarmed. The third door came out of a short hallway connected to the system administrator’s office, and the main entrance of his office was well down the hall from the secure area. But if you knew which doors were wired with alarms, you could force the door into the system administrator’s office, which had the corridor leading directly into the secure area. That one locked from the system administrator’s side, so it would not have to be forced. An outsider trying to intrude into the secure area would not know any of that, and would be stuck with trying to find a
way around the alarms . . .

  “What else?”

  “It turns out that the guard wasn’t responding to anything. He was making his regular rounds. Another guy, this security guy, was on his way to his office, and they went up together in the elevator, and the guard noticed that the door to the office suite had some damage around the door knob. So they went in . . .” She stopped, shaking her head.

  “So what they’re saying is, it wasn’t like there was a sudden shooting and then a bunch of explanations. It was just a guard’s routine trip through the building.”

  “It still could have been set up,” she said, stubbornly.

  “Yeah, but, boy . . .” Didn’t sound good.

  I concentrated on driving for a couple of minutes, getting us out of a pod of Texans headed up the freeway in what seemed to be a test of Chaos Theory: you sensed an order in their driving, but you couldn’t say exactly what it was. I could see the Toyota pickup at the head of the pack, like the lead dolphin.

  After the shooting, Lane said, the police went to a house Jack had rented, with a second security man from AmMath, and found a bunch of computer disks—“Two of them were in a pair of shoes in the closet, which doesn’t sound like Jack at all”—and a lot of other unauthorized stuff from AmMath, including manuals and confidential information about the Clipper II. AmMath wanted to take it, but the cops wouldn’t give it to them: instead, they called in the FBI.

  “They’ve still got it?”

  “Yes. The FBI.”

  “And that’s all.”

  “Well. They say the back entrance and the secure area at AmMath are covered with cameras. A call came into the building computer at TrendDirect—that’s the building owner—and the security cameras were interfered with. The scanning range for the one in the back was changed so that it didn’t scan a door at the end of the building; and the camera that watches the secure area was turned off.”

  “The guards didn’t see that? Weren’t the cameras monitored?”

  “I asked that,” she said. “The camera in back constantly scans back and forth, and the only change was to cut out part of the range. The other camera is one of about ten around the premises, with a constant cycle, three seconds at each station, and they cut out one station. They never noticed the changes.”